Frank Galati directs classic play running through April 14
Though it may be considered one of the most ground-breaking plays in modern theatrical history, Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 classic, “Rhinoceros,” is rarely produced. It hasn’t been seen on Broadway since its debut in 1961.
Asolo Repertory Theatre believes the time is ripe for the play’s satirical look at how easily people can become part of a herd that follows the pronouncements of tyrannical leaders.
Frank Galati, the Tony Award-winning adapter and director of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” is taking a fresh look at Ionesco’s play, which begins Wednesday.
The play deals with an everyman named Berenger who comes to realize that all his neighbors are turning into rhinoceroses. He’s trying to figure out if he should join the herd or stand on his own and become an outsider and an object of ridicule.
Galati said that Ionesco and other mostly European playwrights of his time “were trying to make sense of the carnage they had lived through and witnessed and suffered from” after World War II.
“The very choice of our doing it is part of the conversation about the current state of affairs,” Galati said, noting the political divide that has caused a major rift in contemporary American society.
“The play reverberates with our contemporary malaise and shame. That’s how I feel,” he said. “But it has revealed itself, as we’ve worked on it, as a very deep analysis of tyrannical impulses in the human community, the will to power, to dominate, to suppress, to exterminate, to keep out, to build walls.”
David Breitbarth, a longtime Asolo Rep company member who portrays Berenger, said he found a personal connection to the play through his father, a Jew who was born in Germany.
“I remember him telling me about one day with his sister, they left the house to walk to school, but on this one morning, instead of all the neighborhood children walking with them, they were on the side of the street throwing rocks at them, out of the blue. They had joined the herd.”
In “Rhinoceros,” the social commentary is in relation to the rise of the Third Reich, Breitbarth said. “Ionesco’s friends, some of them brilliant, would find a way to justify becoming a member of the herd. That, for whatever you might take it for, is why we’ve chosen to do it today. He doesn’t ever come out and say it’s about Nazis, but I think it’s more a general warning about how the herd mentality is dangerous for society.”
Producing Artistic Director Michael Donald Edwards said the play emerged at a time when “a great many artists, teachers, poets and musicians were completely blindsided by the rise of fascism and how so many people could come to it so quickly. He is looking at how we, as people, cultural beings, do this. It leads to an absurd view of life and human behavior and a determination to look at who we really are.”
As serious as the subject or motivating factors may be, “People are going to be surprised at how funny this is,” Edwards said. “Despite all this dismay, there is a rage at the bottom of it. Look at ‘Saturday Night Live’ or any of the great comedies. They are furious about injustice and unfairness, but they turn it into hilarity in order for us to think about what we are.”
Actual animals
Actors playing the characters who turn into the rhinoceroses use more than masks or costume pieces to transform themselves, Galati said.
“Ionesco, in his stage directions, does call for some visual and physical cues in his increasing sickness,” Galati said. The character of Gene, played by Matt DeCaro, becomes “very hot. He’s sweating. He’s agitated. He aches, but Berenger says, ‘Do you feel weak?.’ ‘On the contrary,’ Gene says, ‘I’m full of beans.’ Something is taking over him and it’s given him a kind of physical charge as he’s transforming. He does exercises. He wants to do push-ups and sit-ups and dance and jump up and down to combat this transforming physicality that is happening to him.”
The transformation is referred to several times as a disease, Galati said. Berenger says, ‘I’m afraid of catching it, afraid of becoming somebody else.’ It’s a contagion, a virus, and it’s insidious.”
In addition to Breitbarth and DeCaro, the cast includes Laura Rook as Daisy, a co-worker of Berenger’s and also his love interest and Peggy Roeder as Mrs. Boeuf, who shows up at Berenger’s office after her husband becomes a rhinoceros. Matt Mueller and Brandon Dahlquist play two other co-workers.
With the permission of Ionesco’s estate, Galati has made some alterations to the script, turning the official English translation by Derek Prouse into two acts from the original three.
“One of the things about the text and the nature of Ionesco’s aesthetic, he tends to be, if not circular, he returns repeatedly to the same but slightly adjusted riff, like a jazz tune that gets worked and moves through the combo, the piano, the bass, the vocalist and so on,” the director said. “I tried to prune the text so that it would have efficiency and momentum, not so much returning and reflecting and repeating, but moving on and on.”
“Rhinoceros” was long ago labeled, fairly or not, as part of a burgeoning movement of theater of the absurd, first popularized by Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”
The terminology could be a turn-off to some potential audiences, but Edward said there’s “an absurd nature to daily life in America right now. It’s going to make ‘Rhinoceros’ seem like Arthur Miller. I think the daily lunacy that we deal with has prepared us for anything that Ionesco has to throw us. The audience will be just fine, and will be hugely entertained.”
More importantly, he said, the play doesn’t take a position. “That’s the smart thing that Ionesco has done. He never says a word about fascism or the Holocaust. You have to draw your own conclusions.”